Datadobi's DobiMigrate helps Decathlon sprint to cloud storage

Running a marathon isn't just about the final dash -- it's about keeping ahead of your competitors' pace.

Athletic gear retailer Decathlon understands this axiom for its business needs, as well. In order to support its international presence, the company needed to increase the availability and accessibility of its unstructured data and applications away from on-premises hardware and into the cloud.

Not an easy task, considering the company operates more than 1,600 stores in 57 countries.

Tony Devert, a systems engineer at Decathlon, said Datadobi's DobiMigrate software helped him and his team retire four on-premises data centers and shift data storage entirely to multiple international public cloud providers.

"We need to evolve every day, especially in retail," Devert said. "We gained a lot of productivity and agility [moving to cloud]."

Devert said the move, an ongoing initiative for Decathlon since 2017, will help the company protect its data against ransomware and create new modernization opportunities.

He and his team chose DobiMigrate due to its cloud-platform agnosticism, compared with implementing individual cloud APIs -- especially when working with international clouds.

"We saw the speed of deployment was much better than what we could have done in-house," he said.

DobiMigrate also helped the team make sure files got backed up in case of audits or other regional regulations.

"It's important for us to be sure all files migrate," Devert said. "In DobiMigrate, we can clearly see the number of files that have migrated."

Devert also praised Datadobi's support and assistance when his team encountered difficulties during the transfer.

Specifically, some of the Dell EMC storage arrays Decathlon used had yet to receive an update to work with DobiMigrate. Both Datadobi and Dell support helped Devert and his team update the array software to complete the transition.

"They investigated subjects that weren't within the scope [of the contract]," he said. "It's thanks to this expertise we were able to quickly find a solution."

Datadobi's expertise working with Dell EMC isn't surprising, considering its co-founders were former Dell engineers.

Datadobi isn't the only company offering unstructured data migration. Its competitors include Komprise and StrongBox, and analysts say the cloud migration market is only going to become more crowded.

This is a growing market. … File services are the laggards of moving to the cloud.

Andrew Smith, an analyst at IDC, said migration services that bring unstructured files to cloud storage are facing competition from not only one another, but also from the major cloud providers themselves.

"We've seen the cloud files services market expand significantly," he said. "This is a growing market. … File services are the laggards of moving to the cloud."

Massive clouds, like AWS with its Elastic File System and FSx, will provide more options for file storage buyers looking to "lift and shift" and continue to run their programs in the cloud. However, Smith noted, organizations looking to fully optimize cloud utilization will need to rearchitect applications.

Devert said Decathlon is far from finished after moving to the cloud and is seeking to implement new technologies such as multi-cloud infrastructure automation with Terraform.